


wasn't hard to love you (didn't have to try)

by sarahcakes613



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Inspired by Folgers "Home for the Holidays" Commercial, Other, Pseudo-Incest, Unrequited Love, can we all appreciate that being an actual goddamn tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:41:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21738874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/pseuds/sarahcakes613
Summary: And every year, as their quiet morning ends and the day begins, Sansa leans in close and whispers “you’re my present this year.”
Comments: 3
Kudos: 4
Collections: The Leonard Cohen Files





	wasn't hard to love you (didn't have to try)

_Drove you to the station_  
_Never asked you why_  
_Held you for a little while (held you for a little while)_  
_My oh my oh my - _My Oh My, Leonard Cohen

It’s the same every year, when he comes home for the winter break. He rolls in like the cold wind, bag bulging with dirty laundry and messily wrapped presents. It doesn’t matter how late in the night or early in the morning he shows up, she is downstairs as soon as she hears taxi tires crunching on gravel and the door is open before he can fish out his keys.

The tea steeps and the coffee percolates, the house slowly wakes up around them, and when the rest of the family eventually trips down the stairs, Robb and Sansa are already curled up at the breakfast nook, catching up on each other’s stories of dorm life and adventures.

And every year, as their quiet morning ends and the day begins, Sansa leans in close and whispers “you’re my present this year.”.

It began as a joke, his first Christmas home after leaving Winterfell to go to school on the other side of the country. He’d been broke, relying on student loans and his parents for grocery money, and he’d stuck a bow on his shirt before walking into the house, because his presence was the only present he could afford to gift them.

Robb will never let Sansa know how little of a joke it is to him, now. How precious that small moment is, when her breath tips up against his ear and he can close his eyes and pretend she isn’t his sister.

He doesn’t know when the switch in his brain flipped, when he first looked at Sansa and thought “oh gods I love her” and then immediately after, “oh gods I _love_ her.” He thinks maybe it was that first Christmas, when she opened the front door and he was standing there with the shiny bow stuck to his sweater, and she’d jumped into his arms, nearly knocking them both into the snow. But then he thinks maybe it could just as easily have been the day his parents brought her home from the hospital and laid her carefully in his lap, and when her bright blue eyes met his, he immediately knew this little creature would be his world.

Whenever it was, however it happened, he’s been increasingly aware of it for three years now. Three years of fists clenching around phones as he scrolls through her social media accounts, watching her dip in and out of relationships. Three years of finding excuses not to come home for the summer, because it’s hard enough for a week at Christmas, he doesn’t think he could stand to spend two months in her gravitational pull without his sickening truth slipping free. He won’t do that to her, he’ll never do that to her. He will grit his teeth and shake hands with whatever lover she brings home for the holidays and he will stab himself through the heart before he lets her know how he feels.

The end of winter break always comes too soon, and it ends the way it began, just the two of them. Sansa drives him to the train station and the car is a bubble wrapped around him, and inside that bubble is his dream, the dream he lets himself have for the quarter-hour it takes to get from door to door. The trunk clicking open for him to get his bags is the sound of the bubble popping. They hug, and he presses a kiss into her hair.

She always offers to stay, to wave him off from the platform, but this is not a wartime drama and he is not a soldier heading to the front. He shoos her back into the car, waves her off, promises to text when he is safely back in his dorm.

Every Christmas, the same routine, the same joke, the same bubble, the same promise.  
The same bright blue eyes that he would do anything for, even if it means destroying himself.


End file.
